Audiobook and e-book bundling App Shelfie is closing

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From GoodEreader:

Shelfie is a digital bundling platform that allows you to scan your physical bookshelf and it will produce a list of audiobooks and e-books that are eligible to receive discounts. The company has relationships with hundreds of publishers and they all bought into the fact that if you own the print version, you should receive some sort of discount when investing in digital.

You might have heard that e-book sales have been falling on a quarterly basis for the past two years. This is primarily due to the fact that people are losing trust in the format. Companies have been closing at an accelerated rate and people who made a ton of purchases lose access to their e-bookr or are forced to do business with Kobo.

Shelfie formally known as Bit.lit launched in 2013 and the company is based in Vancouver, British Columbia. They have just announced that they are shutting down their servers on January 31st 2017 and gave their users less than 24 hours notice. The vast majority of e-books that customers had purchased had DRM, which means everything will be lost and there is no way to back them up.

Link to the rest at GoodEreader

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15 thoughts on “Audiobook and e-book bundling App Shelfie is closing”

  1. A little late-breaking news on this story: Kobo has stepped up to provide downloads of Shelfie ebooks for another month. Might this mean they’re planning to buy Shelfie the way they have various other ebook stores? Will be interesting to see.

  2. Another reason to remember your ebooks are not something you own, but are licensed only, and can be deleted at any time by the entity you got it from. As well, this is the big reason, for me, ebooks are not worth paying anywhere near a paperback price for.

  3. Good eReader reproduced almost all of Data Guy’s presentation on their site. I agree with Meadows, they have not been diligent about crediting sources and sometimes misrepresent or miss the true focus of others’ stories

  4. “You might have heard that e-book sales have been falling on a quarterly basis for the past two years. This is primarily due to the fact that people are losing trust in the format.”

    Ah, the qig5 is having this problem due to pricing themselves out of the market. Other ebooks are taking up the slack and more.

    Seems ‘GoodEreader’ is still just a mouthpiece for trad-pub and should be trusted to tell the truth only as trad-pub sees it.

      • He may be upset that his $700 tablet isn’t in big demand and wants to blame it on ebooks rather than him being too late to market with an overpriced toy.

        Edited because me thinks slower than me types?

      • I kicked in a couple bucks (not enough to get a tablet, but enough to get ongoing information), they are just starting to ship the tablets.

  5. The reason I never bought into Shelfie (and big surprise that they gave people less than 24 hours notice to backup everything, if they were able to at all) is that in order to apply for the discounted eBooks, you had to mark up your physical copy, essentially making it impossible to resell if you cash your old books in for store credit. You had to write all over the title page, and that was something I was not willing to do.

    I saw the email from them yesterday saying they were closing effectively that day, and thought, “So what? Another one bites the dust.” My Kindle is still full of content with no signs of stopping anytime soon.

  6. ^^^

    Saved me a lot of typing.

    Agree that folks are not going to go somewhere else when Amazon or Kobo or whoever gives them what they want on the spot.

  7. I have my doubts about GoodEReader’s analysis. (Indeed, I try not to use them as a source for anything wherever possible, as they have a habit of reusing news from other sources—including TeleRead—and then not crediting those sources.)

    As I say in my own take on the matter, I think this can be put down more to the fact that the vast majority of ebook customers are content to venture no further than Amazon (or, to a lesser extent, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple, or whatever their “usual” source is) because they make it so easy to buy. They’re not going to bother seeking out another store, even one that gives them a sweet discount for owning the paper book already. It’s too much trouble to figure out how to read an ebook outside of their preferred solution, their own store of choice.

    Smaller stores going out of business and taking customer catalogs with them scaring people can’t be that big of a reason for a sales decline, because hardly anyone buys ebooks from stores small enough to be in any danger of going out of business in the first place. And that’s why those smaller stores do go out of business—hardly anyone is buying anything from them. It’s a vicious cycle.

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